Congratulations, you found one of the only reviewers that seems to understand Don DeLillo’s ingenious new book Point Omega. This is also an absolute spoiler, a dissected exposition leaving all stones over-turned and nothing left to discover. Read the book first. It’s a good book. It will only take one or two sittings. Trust me, it will be worth it. Okay, you’re back? Did you read it on the train to work on your Kindle?
As you’ll see, a majority of the critics have found fault with Point Omega. Are they just smarting over the fact that they paid $24 for a one-hundred-seventeen page book (or Kindled it for $11)? I would be. I got mine out of the library. I have to admit I began reading it feeling like a bit of a chump, like a sucker that’s supposed to take what would have been a few chapters in that tome Underworld as a fully realized novel. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. I take it now more as a haiku, a condensed pill that grows after you swallow it, the kind you get more from each time you think about it. I want all the books I read to be condensed works of genius like this one. Not that I’d pay $24 but…
The critics are taking Point Omega as a later, lesser work of DeLillo. They seem all too ready to dismiss it as a sign of his decline. One critic typically said of Point Omega: “It reaches for enigmatic profundity but meanders”. Another similarly said DeLillo used to have good plots driving a “latent subtext… freighted with metaphysical portent” like the obvious, almost tongue-in-cheek airborne toxic event in White Noise. Point Omega, he says, doesn’t have the “history-spanning event that can provide some center of gravity.” Alan Cheuse thinks DeLillo has become “a parody of himself”—no, I think this is more focused DeLillo. Bob Minzesheimer is confused about who’s who in the book but offers an interesting comparison: “The novel as conceptual art piece.” I could work with that. But his proposed solution (his “about”) is vague and generally off target. It’s “about how language, film and art alter what we think of as reality.” That kind of vagueness seems to be typical of how most reviewers take anything they don’t understand. Well, just how do we think of reality and why is it important enough for a major writer to write a complicated book about it?
The critics wrongly see the point of the book as its faults, that it “never gets where we’re promised”—but in fact it does. They’re generally trying to figure it out by decoding the information they’re given into a solid statement about what it’s “really” about. They feel unsatisfied without that answer. A good plot resolution would at least dispel that pang, but that expectation isn’t met. But each has their answer, their clavis which attempts to clarify things where DeLillo didn’t: it’s “about” identity, the Iraq War, autism, art, duration, “lateness”. Justin Cartwright comes closest in noticing the theme of the “unease and disjunction of the American psyche” and that the characters’ supposedly philosophical pronouncements and conversations, are really, “absolutely incoherent rubbish”. It seems British reviewers (like the above Cartwright and James Lasdun) “get it” more than Americans. One commenter (kcrwhite) on Lasdun’s review seems to agree: “US reviewers don't understand Delillo's work anymore –apparently it requires a level of interpretation they are incapable of these days.” I totally agree.
What critics are missing is an appreciation of irony. Many would cite this as a long-standing difference between Americans and the British, but I think its absence from the American mind has become more exasperated and best seller lists are symptomatic of its increasing endangerment. The prosaic American mind prefers the straightforwardness of plot to the challenges of irony. All they want is the former and can so easily do without the latter that they don’t have the ability to notice it. They want to be entertained without any effort on their part. Irony is by its nature a discrepancy, perhaps between what is said and the reality: in effect, it is thinking about one thing as two things simultaneously. This brief essay was the only one I found to focus on irony, but only to desperately make the case that it’s all really “about” the Iraq war. If you want to connect the theme of detachment from reality to the Iraq war you would not be wrong but that “point” is incidental, that is just another product of our disconnect, not the focus of the book.
I might as well offer my “about” here: Point Omega’s “about” being out of touch with reality and carried off into an ether of disconnected ideas and details. All the ideas thrown about in Point Omega that reviewers are either trying to take seriously or are puzzled by are in fact “rubbish”. That’s the irony. You’re not supposed to be taking these characters and the bizarre things they say seriously. And that’s the big ironic point the critics miss.
I assume they think the same man who wrote the overt satire of absurd postmodernity White Noise has since switched off that satirical and critical eye by the time he wrote Point Omega? Now he eschews plot in favor of wrapping an “about” in various cloaks and in Point Omega he just hasn’t pulled it off as well? This seems to me to be the position of the critics in their present evaluation of DeLillo. Truly Point Omega is so ironic it is practically a sustained joke, but because it is DeLillo it is a creepy and at times tragic one.
A brief plot summary in case you refuse to read the short book first. If as some reviewers have suggested the terse book’s structure is to be taken as Haiku-like, that would be the short-long-short arrangement. The first “short” is of a man engrossed in an art exhibit called 24 hour Psycho, which is in fact a screening of that film slowed down to a frame-by-frame speed. He watches it from the time the museum opens until it closes. The anonymous man gets awfully philosophical watching it, obsessed, and implied in his dedication and focus is something monastic and insightful, that he’s digging deeper into the nature of perception and reality, that if he could do it the right way it might be transformative experience.
The broad middle section consists of a film maker named Jim Finley who is trying to convince a McNamara/ Rumsfeldish neocon Iraq War architect Richard Elster to monologue before a camera in a kind of minimalistic documentary. The filmmaker has visited Elster at his minimalistic desert vacation home where they talk minimalistic DeLillo talk and Finley makes several wary attempts at coaxing the retired war planner into participating in his project. Soon Elster’s daughter Jessie arrives and she’s weird in a space cadet kind of way but Finley is attracted to her. Then one day she disappears—it’s thought she might have just committed suicide by walking out into the desert—but the searches never find her and Elster is devastated and they leave the desert for civilization.
For the third and last section, the ring cycle returns us to the man watching 24 hour Psycho. Here he meets Jessie with whom he has an awkward conversation and gets her phone number. I have of course skipped all the details, all the endless digressions and thoughts of the characters as these things go on and it is in those details that it is revealed to the careful reader that there is something quite wrong with all these people.
DeLillo isn’t going to spell out for us that his characters are mental. To me this is one of the greatest uses of his irony. Can you recognize a member of a sick society or can you not because you are one of them? I don’t mean to say that anybody who doesn’t “get” what he’s doing is in any way unsound—there’s a literary jungle to chop through first—but we’re so used to hearing bullshit that it starts to become a white noise indistinguishable from non-bullshit. We are in the position of his characters as they question one another and receive vague incomprehensible answers in return. Dialogue (or monologue) seems to be going somewhere, seems to have a point, but it never seems to get there, nothing ever becomes clear. Critics take this incorrectly as a failing of the book when it is in fact purposeful. At times the characters try to interpret these conundrums in their own way, but often they write them off as Zen-like utterances that convey truth beyond a rational level. Or maybe they think they’re just not smart enough to understand. How often does this happen to each of us? DeLillo brings the reader to this familiar point, deficient in knowledge but with a handful of hints, and demands our efforts to fill in some of the blanks. This is Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” or theory of omission in which events in a character’s past are hinted at and it’s left to the reader to build their own theory based on implication. (I would even argue that Underworld is this theory on steroids, fleshed out to a socio-historical level.) As with suspense or horror genres it is much more powerful when the reader has to supply their own details instead of having it done for them. Mystery novels aren’t icebergs but a linear process of uncovering causes—they’re not supposed to leave anything unexplained. These lesser genres rarely leave things unexplicated, but good art gets the mind thinking. How did Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle end up like that? How does this similar weirdo in Point Omega watching the film everyday live? Does he have a job? Is he sort of normal looking or a total whack job? We meet people all the time that can make us wonder by some revealed quirk just how nuts they are. If we are limited by a character’s narrative perspective we get fewer clues to work with. Simply seeing how a person is dressed, their hygiene, allows us to eliminate an entire category of questions, but from such a limited perspective it’s more like talking to somebody via computer. We are necessarily working within their world with only probes of doubt or red flags in the details that enable the possibility of another perspective.
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Let me spell it out. Let me show you that these people are fucked up, they are victims of modernity trying to unravel themselves, their world and their problems with the nostrums and hollow philosophies of postmodernity. Keep in mind that the overarching irony is that we are not supposed to take these people seriously– but that’s what all the critics are trying to do. In fact a common criticism is that characters lack emotional depth! The characters are absurd, lost crazy people talking and thinking desperate nonsense that—like much of postmodernism—has taken enough of the form of the meaningful that it fools you into thinking it has meaning. That’s why nothing seems to work if you try to figure it out, that’s why nothing ever seems to resolve itself. (And again, it is a great irony that White Noise is the very textbook spelling out satirically those absurd postmodern phenomena.) What follows is the partially fleshed out iceberg of the characters based on hints dropped along the way.
The filmmaker Finley is trying to see beyond ex-war hawk Elster’s own rationalizations and intellectual defenses. Ironically this is what we have to do with the characters as well, but for which they don’t seem to have the capacity. There are hints at Finley’s neuroses tied up with his failed marriage. His wife complained about him, “Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?” He is a loser, never finishing any of his wild schemes, but he can’t see it. He’s out of touch. There’s not much evidence he is too smart either. He holds the belief that if you are intense enough about anything then it becomes something higher, something religious, rapturous. One of his last projects was a kind of marathon examining Jerry Lewis marathons—another example of the idea that focusing in on the minutia of anything can somehow make it worthwhile. Even a subject like Jerry Lewis marathons is deep if you focus on it obsessively. In Point Omega that which is less clear is imagined to be clearer: there must be more truth, more purity in the formless, in minimalism. A typical exchange between Finley and Elster:
“Who was there?” I said. “Cabinet-level people? Military people?”
“Whoever was there. That’s who was there.”
I liked this answer. It said everything. The more I thought about it, the clearer everything seemed.
DeLillo loves having his characters utter pseudo-koans, the kind that might make a man wearing his ball cap backwards respond with a floored, “Whoa.” Problem is too many readers (and critics) think they’re supposed to be taken seriously. Or how about this bit of philosophizing by Jim Finley for zombified pseudo-Zen disconnect:
“The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware. ... His life happened ... when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner."
There seems to be a lot of confusion among critics even about who’s who and who’s doing what. I don’t think there’s any good reason to think that Jim Finley is the artist behind 24 hour Psycho. But I do think it is more than heavily implied the stalker of Elster’s daughter Jessie named Dennis is the man watching 24 hour Psycho. In fact he is a 24 hour Psycho, another fine specimen in the DeLillo opus, that of the lone quiet psychopath like Oswald in Libra, (and the model of them all Travis Bickle) who seems a casualty of modernity, of postmodern chaos and urban inconsequentiality (living with his mother in his “small flat being consumed by rising towers”), of mental illness latching on to something that seems profound, a corrective masking a history of confusion and pain implied but out of the story’s scope, that a frame-by-frame experience of the world is “where everything is so intensely what it is.” Then after philosophizing on his supposed profound insights he hilariously admits it is probably a girl he’s looking to meet, fantasizing of another with whom he could share his warped reality. If that revelation isn’t enough to make you wonder, out of nowhere he imagines the museum guard shooting himself in the head and he is alone with the film. What other reason would there be to include such a non sequitur, but to show this guy is a whacko? This guy is a Travis Bickle!
At the end of the book I think it is more than subtly suggested that this guy is himself also a Norman Bates and that he has a mummified mother at home. He actually imagines himself becoming Norman Bates, “assimilated, pore by pore”. In his mental illness he does not even know this is what’s behind his obsession with the film. To him it as if viewing the frame by frame shots of the movie would be like examining the inner workings of his own mind, of what is wrong—but of course there is nothing to be found for, as in Antonioni’s Blow Up, that which is unclear does not become clearer in magnification.
Each in their own way, these characters are looking inward in flawed ways, venturing within, without any guide and seeing nothing because they don’t know where or how to look. Our postmodern society doesn’t have the tools to offer, the framework, they were all thrown out with the bathwater. Ironically they’re trying to make their world more real, more graspable by going beyond it, by perceiving warped or extreme versions of reality: armchair war planning, a marathon of a marathon of Jerry Lewis, a film slowed down so as to be rendered incomprehensible and meaningless. The harder you look the more that which is sensible breaks down, becomes out of synch, peters out into a soothing white noise.
Ironically the person our 24 hour psycho Dennis meets while watching is Elster’s daughter Jessie who has her own issues dealing with reality, who has slippages inward to an apparent dead world, whose out-of-synchness has her reading people’s lips to supposedly understand what they’re going to say before they say it. In today’s jargon she is probably somewhere on the “autistic spectrum”.
Elster is the only semi-sane character, at times revealing some insight into his mistakes and delusions. ("Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation.”) I suspect he’s escaping to the desert, recovering from a nervous breakdown. Symptomatic might be how he philosophically rationalizes his out-of-touchness, discussing the titular Point Omega as conceived by Teilhard de Chardin, a kind of teleological singularity where human consciousness eventually becomes one with the mind of God. Elster interprets it in a less attractive way: as reality extenuated to the point of nullification, that somehow a negation of human consciousness, to be “stones in a field”, is supposed to be a good thing. It is like the desolation of his desert retreat, supposedly therapeutic, even clarifying. But one wonders… and one must wonder if his retreat into nihilistic coldness has its result in whatever is wrong with his daughter and has as its consequence her disappearance, as if she were a cruel manifestation of that nullification.
Why is it none of the critics have gotten even close to such an interpretation? Has the stigma against mental illness entered so-called literary criticism? Is it forbidden to simply peg a character as fucked up, or is it that DeLillo is suspected of undermining things we hold near and dear—passion, intensity, that there has to be something worthwhile in a fixation, an autism or mania regardless of its content—so we can’t look at it as such? Critics are missing the irony, the satire, the critique on some of our society’s strange nihilistic ideas that protects it from looking at its own rampant mentally illness. I’m reminded of those intellectual hoaxes where respected academics accept an article or thesis only to be made fools of when it is revealed as purposefully gibberish.
To take a sick society with a serious face, to take its absurdities on face value, to treat a psycho born from such a society as if a “rational actor” requires irony. There are perhaps three types of DeLillo novel: the outwardly satirical (White Noise), irony stretched so thin it’s transparent (Underworld), and then somewhere between, the pretty ironic satire subtle enough for Americans to miss it, but visible to the British eye (Mao II, Point Omega).
DeLillo likes to take a symptom of the under-diagnosed neurosis dubbed postmodernity and elaborate on a theme: the ubiquitous, high-pitched, screaming stupidity of American culture in its pregnant widow trimester in White Noise, monothematic homogenization through repetition in Mao II, underlying neurotic cold war fear of annihilation in a nation suppressed by the ever-looming and very real possibility of nuclear holocaust in Underworld. The grand irony is that all the books’ characters attend to the products of neuroses wholeheartedly, they embrace and revel in them as good things because they naively know of nothing else. In Point Omega you’d be looking for implications of the autistic, the misfocussed, the out of touch. The less conscious these themes are to the reader (and the characters) the higher the irony, the more explicated, the lower the irony. For instance, at the ending of Underworld when Nick Shay visits the Bruegelesque hospital for radiation victims, irony has relatively evaporated. The mutants are the overt results of abortive yet residual thermonuclear war as opposed to the previously sublimated objects of fear, e.g. the fetishized baseball. In the latter the irony is high. You’re not supposed to take their obsession with the ball on face value—DeLillo’s better than that. A similar contrast exists in Point Omega with the disappearance of the daughter which brings a concrete gravity (and low irony) to the ironic state of detached ideologies in which her father and the filmmaker Jim had been consumed. You could make lists of examples of such themes for each book, most of which would fall under the heading of higher irony with the occasional almost cathartic appearances of low irony. But even the points of low irony still resonate with some relative irony—never do you completely leave its control. It is DeLillo’s art, his genius, to corral such disparate manifestations into a cohesive work with the perfect balance.
Now tell me that with all that I have come up with (and that’s just skimming the surface) DeLillo is not becoming a more refined master whose themes run deeper and whose subtleties reverberate further. Now read the (mostly American) reviewers who can’t seem to find much of anything to like about the book, who think it a diminished low-caloric DeLillo, a DeLillo who couldn’t bring it all together and deliver.
